On Mon, 22 Aug 1994, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:> <rant>> It's no wonder the WWW specs are so poorly maintained. You not only> have to design, write, and edit the dang thing, but because folks> don't actually read the specs (partly because they're out of date> because nobody wants to edit them...), you have to watch the> discussion to be sure that implmentors don't get the wrong idea and> implement something else, because we all know that the specs don't> really matter... the existing implementations are what really> matter...> > AAAARGH! Do we really expect to build a large, complex, distributed> hypermedia system with such lack of diligence?!?!?> > </rant>

*Many* times I've gone looking for specs related to HTTP/HTML issues,
scouring CERN, NCSA, using any and all robots, only to come up short - a lot
of what's there is poorly maintained, out of date, irrelevant, or pipe dreams
that never saw their way to implementation. Saying "it's in the hypermail
archive" isn't a help either, since short of reading a large chunk of the
messages I don't have a way of finding the information I need. Finally,
hardly any of these docs contain a last-modifed date, so I have no idea
how current they are. This is one thing I'm hoping W3O will make a
priority of fixing.